[insert game here] is too good!

I’m playing Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine DLC that adds a new region, culture, Skyrim-levels of property management (for one residence, as far as I can tell), new mutations, and a ton of things to do.

I revisited Witcher 3 in September, which is rare for me these days with my wife, kids, career, volunteer work, pets, etc. I just don’t have the time to replay.

Anyhow, thought I’d get to the DLC, but I felt lost, so I just started replaying Witcher 3.

All the content is really lovingly crafted and there’s so much of it. It’s almost like too much of a good thing.

I could see calling Street Fighter 2 (pick your version) a game that was just above and beyond for it’s time. Overwatch, similarly, is so well-crafted that I could probably be happy with that as my only game.

My only problem with games this good is that they rob me of my time to experience all the other cool games out there. Any games out there, after the hype has cooled, that you just find absurdly better than the competition?

The amount of good content in Bloodborne is actually kind of absurd. Most of the souls games have a few iffy boss fights, 1 or 2 downright bad ones, and even some of the good ones are too easy or simplistic to really shine. But in Bloodborne, every fight is at least fun or interesting. You have to dig into the Chalice dungeons to find the uninteresting content, and even then you'll find plenty of great things to keep you going.

Bloodborne is hit after hit, and the DLC introduces arguably the 3 best bosses in the game, all in a row. Not to mention the game had some of the best environmental storytelling and lore in the entire series much less videogames. I think Dark Souls has it beat on the storytelling side of things ever so slightly, but Bloodborne's gameplay is just out of this world. It has such good boss fights that the boss fights in pretty much all other games disappoint me now.

I've developed this unfair Tales from the Borderlands barometer by which I gauge every adventure game I've played since that one. I really, deeply enjoyed that game, but comparing adventure games other than story-heavy narratively focused ones like Telltale's other modern games against it doesn't give them enough of a chance or credit.

It also might be hyperbole, but I think Link to the Past and Mario World are as perfect a pair of video games as you can find. What's weird is I doubt they'd crack my top ten personal favorite games, but I consider them as close to flawless as we've seen in the industry.

I've played through Dark Souls a number of times, most recently remastered this year and I just love that world so much that I was genuinely sad when I had nothing left to do but go to the Kiln of the First Flame and take out Gwyn.

There is just something special about that world to me where every time I play it, I become so full absorbed within it. I start reading everything I can, rewatching lore videos and taking the art book off the shelf.

I have so many good games on my plate right now... But I'm still just booting up DMC 3/4 every time I sit down to play something. Ever since the announcement of 5 in.... July? I've just been playing them constantly, and it still hasn't gotten boring. The itch remains strong. I had already beaten them multiple times years ago, but I'm well on my way to 100% both in the last couple of months from clean saves. Damn it's got me hooked. And I still think Bayonetta is the better game, so that has gone EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!

League of Legends for a looong time has bullied out other games that compete for my time. I'm not really a super active player anymore, but I always come back to it for a few games every couple of months. It's just really engaging, but too time consuming. I had a similar fling with Dota 2 for a good 1500 hours. But with the passage of time, I look back on that less fondly. And I don't want to go back to it.

Dark Souls and Witcher are given answers to this. They basically raised the bar for what I want out of my fantasy games. I'm less interested in games like Darksiders or Dragon Age because the setting, atmosphere, gameplay or "lore" just doesn't compete with what has become the golden standard for me. And it's very hard to go back to some old games I used to like for the same reasons.

@nutter: are the me in disguise? Blood and Wine is fan fucking tastic. It's sooooooo good it hurts. And Overwatch is basically my favorite game of all time (bar EverQuest but that's not fair), I play every day it is amazing.

@frodobaggins: Yeah, I’ve been at this since before I can remember, playing the 2600 and Odyssey. Witcher 3 and Overwatch make me feel great about this hobby. Neither are doing anything super new, but it’s so well-refined. AND there are other games out there doing new things all the time.

I'm very rarely a super hyped chracter, but I can get in that mood when I'm playing something new and exciting(to me), or vastly improved. Street Fighter 2 with my friends when I was a kid, Ocarina of Time with my siblings, discovering 3d movement through Super Mario 64, playing Metroid Fusion after only having played Metroid 2 on the Game Boy, that kinda thing. These hype moments have become rarer and rarer as I've just played more stuff. I think recently, only wandering around the sandbox of Skyrim, and last year Breath of the Wild, absolutely blew me away.

In terms of being insanely better than its competition, it's premature, but everything they're putting into Smash Ultimate makes me retroactively disappointed in every fighting game that needs to nickle and dime you for DLC and additional versions just to reach a fraction of the content Smash Ultimate is going to have. I'd also put Persona 5 in this category. You can tell that game was worked on for a real long time, massively improved from the previous one, with love put into every detail.

It’s been a while since I have played this game, but it is still a blast to play. It feels perfectly balanced for a RPG for me. It has the right difficulty curve, the right amount of linearity and exploration. The characters are all memorable. It is all around such a good game, I feel like I will always come back to this game and replay it for the rest of my life.

Subnautica is a rare and beautiful game that is compulsively engaging. Whenever I am away from it, I daydream about jumping in again until I finish it. I still think about it from time to time, almost a month after I finished it and I'm eager for its standalone sequel to come out. There's this constant forward momentum from the time your ship crash-lands up until the end. The world oozes with mystery that locating points of interests is rewarding and propels you to investigate further. The lived-in feel of the world also contributes to its atmosphere. It also leaves you to your own devices, confident that its world has enough charm to make the player want to explore its depths. I even imagine Fallout 76 could have been better had they looked at how Subnautica handled their exploration and crafting. This is also my way of getting my message out there. I know only Dan played it extensively but hopefully, it gets its moment during the GOTY discussion if only to raise awareness so I can have more experiences like this. It left quite a positive impression on me that few other games have. This is my kind of sandbox.

HITMAN (and 2) fits that bill for me. There's something innately satisfying about pulling strings on the puppets in their diorama worlds to see what happens. I can lose hours upon hours playing the "what if I did this" game. It's a toy that never gets old.